Luleåbiennalen 2020 | Hanna Ljungh & Mattias Hållsten – Seismic Event

Luleå Biennial 2020:
Time on Earth
21.11.2020~14.2.2020

Information regarding Covid-19

Last chance The Luleå Biennial 2020: Time on Earth

Wednesday February 10, 16~20 and Saturday February 13–Sunday February 14, 12~16
Galleri Syster is open. Group show with Augusta Strömberg, Susanna Jablonski and Ana Vaz.

Thursday February 11–Sunday February 14, 12~16
Havremagasinet länskonsthall in Bodenis open. Group show with Beatrice Gibson, Susanna Jablonski, Birgitta Linhart, Fathia Mohidin, Charlotte Posenenske, Tommy Tommie and Danae Valenza.

Saturday February 13–Sunday February 14, 14~18
The former prison Vita Duvan is open with an electro acoustic installation by Maria W Horn.

Saturday February 13, 15~19
The artist Markus Öhrn and the poet David Väyrynens sound installation "Bikt" is exhibited on the ice by Residensgatan in Luleå. Listen to older generations of Tornedal women and their testimonies.

Book your visit via Billetto. Drop in is possible as far as space allows.

For those of you who do not have the opportunity to physically visit the Luleå Biennale on site, a radio show including artist talks, sound works and specially written essays will be on stream on Saturday February 13–Sunday February 14. Visit our radio page here.

The exhibitions at Norrbotten's Museum, Luleå konsthall, Välkommaskolan in Malmberget and the Silver Museum are unfortunatly closed.

2018~2021

Lulu is how Luleå first appeared in writing in 1327, a name of Sami origin that can be translated as “Eastern Water”. This is the title of the Luleå Biennial’s journal, fiirst published in conjunction with the Luleå Biennial 2018. For this years edition of the biennial readers are offered different points of entry to the biennial’s overall theme: realism today. The Lulu journal is made by the biennial’s artistic and invited guest editors. It is published here on the biennial’s website and can be downloaded for printing. Design: Aron Kullander-Östling & Stina Löfgren.

ISSN: 2003~1254

2020

Hanna Ljungh & Mattias Hållsten – Seismic Event

Stone, fields, soil, land and mountains have long been the materials Hanna Ljungh uses to explore the relationship between matter and people. Seismic Event is a poetic observation and an analogy of human and geological time. The transience of a human life stands in contrast to what we consider to be the near-eternal state of a mountain. The title alludes to the earthquakes caused by human intervention in the mountain during ore mining, to the unforeseen or spontaneous quakes that happen when the mountain is hollowed.

In the work, Ljungh reads aloud reports on seismic events in Malmberget. These are brief descriptions of what took place and where, both above and below ground. Ljungh recites the reports one at a time, before, in collaboration with Mattias Hållsten, she transposes the pitch to create an acoustic image consisting of slow vibrations and rumble. While she reads, the seismic events are filtered through her own body to once again take the shape of the earthquakes they describe.

These seismic events have their own poetics and a singular shimmer. They are a conglomerate of the practical vagueness of everyday life and accurately measured numbers. These numbers denote changes in the mountain’s matter, which has laid untouched for perhaps a billion years, now recorded in our present calendars as an incident a Tuesday in January just before three. In the sound piece the artists move between addresses and places in Malmberget, of which some still exists and others are history. In this movement a circular reasoning takes place, about holes, time, shakings and voids; about the phantom pains of the mountain and the materiality of vacuity.

Thanks to Masha Taavoniku and Johan Airijoki for their participation.